ok, it's working fine so far, but how to prevent xine from taking over sound volume controll for the whole system. Everything else is working fine and I got good sound quality in all apps. And I can handle sound volume independent in all other apps (xmms, alsaplayer, gaim), only when I change volume in Xine it's like handling the master volume.

I'm running gentoo-sources 2.6.11, xine 0.9.23, and alsa stuff just updated today.
I compiled all those apps with alsa-support (where available)
I tried out a lot of settings for .asoundrc (mostly from this thread) as well as no .asoundrc at all.
I've tried both kernel modules (the builtin and media-sound/alsa-driver).
I've also tried differnt configurations for xine

My sound card is an on-board VT82C686 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50) (via82xx) with an ICEnsemble 1232 chip, and the following works for me nicely (I can play music in Rhythmbox and hear the sound effects of bzflag and gaim all at the same time):

I don't think this has been mentioned:
If you emerge alsa-drivers, by default it does oss emulation by modules (snd-pcm-oss, etc...). These appear to be used even when you run a program using aoss. You can tell this is happening to you if you can run an oss program without aoss. As such, any dmix trickery in asound.conf is bypassed, and you won't be able to play multiple streams from oss programs. The solution to this is to disable kernel level OSS emulation. I'm not sure how to do this with alsa-driver (USE=-oss?), but if you are using the drivers available in the kernel (I'm using 2.6), you can just unselect the two OSS options.

The next step is to get the latest version version of aoss from CVS, as it supposedly fixes the buggy fopen() emulation (read: Should work with quake 3!).

EDIT: Damn out of date wikis, the fopen() patch has been in since 1.0.6 - and q3 still doesn't work I get sound, but it's really scratchy, and in game it is just random noise. Hopefully adjusting my buffer or rate will fix things up. Anyone have any other ideas?

Hope this helps someone, had me stumped for a while. Read more at the ALSA Wiki

I know there is a 'howto' guide which is supposed to get Teamspeak working in Gentoo, but it didn't really work for me. And I'm not too keen on having to rm anything in /dev just to get a software app to behave correctly.

Teamspeak requires sound capture for the mic to work. It only supports OSS.

If I could get this DMIX to enable me to use Teamspeak with alsa-oss, and play games like America's Army in Linux, life would be perfect. Any help would be appreciated._________________Answer a simple question with a simple answer!

To those still having trouble you may want to let ALSA automagically configure things for you. From what I can tell, ALSA does built-in software-mixing as of 1.0.9-rc2. So far it seems to work well on my onboard VIA chip (using the in-kernel via82xx driver with Linux 2.6.12-rc3)_________________~~ Peter: Programmer, Mathematician, STEM & Free Software Advocate, Enlightened Agent, Transhumanist, Fedora contributor
Who am I? :: EFF & FSF

To those still having trouble you may want to let ALSA automagically configure things for you. From what I can tell, ALSA does built-in software-mixing as of 1.0.9-rc2. So far it seems to work well on my onboard VIA chip (using the in-kernel via82xx driver with Linux 2.6.12-rc3)

hmm... sorry to bump up an old thread but i'm curious... how would i configure this, then, using inte8x0 hardware? (i installed alsa-driver rc3, as the real 1.0.9 didn't work for me)

[edit] Cancel that. I got it working with XMMS (as verified by the fact i can have XMMS playing and KDE sounds at the same time). however, i can't get mplayer to cooperate. _________________Sheepdog
Why Risk It? | Samba Howto

after monkeying with it for about a couple of hours, i figured out a workaround. i simply had mplayer run output through esd instead of straight to alsa, and i configured esd (per instructions on the wiki page) to mix through dmix.

this is sweet ... now i'm listening to an audio stream in mplayer, P.O.D. on XMMS, and am minimizing/maximizing this window (well, not right now but you get the idea) to trigger KDE sounds. this is great! _________________Sheepdog
Why Risk It? | Samba Howto

I'm using kernel 2.6.12-r6, gentoo sources, with ALSA compiled in, using only the driver for my AC'97. All my programs that want to play sound can. I would like to get hardware mixing working, but I must admit that I am very confused, because most of this howto seems to deal with 2.4 kernels and using external modules for ALSA. So I was wondering if anyone could answer a few questions for me...

What packages do I need to install if I use 2.6?
Do any of these packages require me to remove ALSA components from my kernel?
If so which components?
How do I set up my /etc/asoundrc file correctly?
How do I set up various apps, specifically XMMS, madplay, GAIM, mplayer, ogg123, and firefox/thunderbird?

just delete all the /etc/asound.conf and config files and install the most rescent alsa. i use the release in the nitro5 kernel. it works nicely and gives a nice performance boost on the desktop as well. you get full software mixing this way

Hi I tried nitro-5 but the in kernel intel pro wireless 2200 drivers don't seem to work, and the external ones won't compile against nitro-5, so I went back to 2.6.12-gentoo-r6, with ALSA removed from the kernel. I emerged asla-drivers, alsa-libs, alsa-oss, alsa-utils, and alsa-tools. Then I ran alsaconf, and viola! Now I have sound mixing working in everything except firefox (flash), which still locks the device. No config file alteration necessary. I had no /etc/asound.conf or .asoundrc before doing the emerges._________________Adopt an unanswered post today